The Thirty-Nine Steps rh-1

by John Buchan

  Then I went back to wider considerations. Whereabouts would a man be likely to leave for Germany, a man in a hurry, who wanted a speedy and a secret passage? Not from any of the big harbours. And not from the Channel or the West Coast or Scotland, for, remember, he was starting from London. I measured the distance on the map, and tried to put myself in the enemy’s shoes. I should try for Ostend or Antwerp or Rotterdam, and I should sail from somewhere on the East Coast between Cromer and Dover.

  All this was very loose guessing, and I don’t pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don’t know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.

  So I set out all my conclusions on a bit of Admiralty paper. They ran like this:—

  FAIRLY CERTAIN

  Place where there are several sets of stairs; one that matters distinguished by having thirty-nine steps.

  Full tide at 10.17 p.m. Leaving shore only possible at full tide.

  Steps not dock steps, and so place probably not harbour.

  No regular night steamer at 10.17. Means of transport must be tramp (unlikely), yacht, or fishing-boat.

  There my reasoning stopped. I made another list, which I headed “Guessed,” but I was just as sure of the one as the other.

  GUESSED

  Place not harbour but open coast.

  Boat—trawler, yacht, or hunch.

  Place somewhere on East Coast between Cromer and Dover.

  It struck me as odd that I should be sitting at that desk with a Cabinet Minister, a Field-Marshal, two high Government officials, and a French General watching me, while from the scribble of a dead man I was trying to drag a secret which meant life or death for us.

  Sir Walter had joined us, and presently Macgillivray arrived. He had sent out instructions to watch the ports and railway stations for the three men whom I had described to Sir Walter. Not that he or anybody else thought that that would do much good.

  “Here’s the most I can make of it,” I said. “We have got to find a place where there are several staircases down to the beach, one of which has thirty-nine steps. I think it’s a piece of open coast with biggish cliffs, somewhere between the Wash and the Channel. Also it’s a place where full tide is at 10.17 to-morrow night.”

  Then an idea struck me. “Is there no Inspector of Coastguards or some fellow like that who knows the East Coast?”

  Whittaker said there was, and that he lived in Clapham. He went off in a car to fetch him, and the rest of us sat about the little room and talked of anything that came into our heads. I lit a pipe and went over the whole thing again till my brain grew weary.

  About one in the morning the coastguard man arrived. He was a fine old fellow, with the look of a naval officer, and was desperately respectful to the company. I left the War Minister to cross-examine him, for I felt he would think it cheek in me to talk.

  “We want you to tell us the places you know on the East Coast where there are cliffs, and where several sets of steps run down to the beach.”

  He thought for a bit. “What kind of steps do you mean, sir? There are plenty of places with roads cut down through the cliffs, and most roads have a step or two in them. Or do you mean regular staircases—all steps, so to speak?”

  Sir Arthur looked towards me. “We mean regular staircases,” I said.

  He reflected a minute or two. “I don’t know that I can think of any. Wait a second. There’s a place in Norfolk—Brattlesham—beside a golf course, where there are a couple of staircases to let the gentlemen get a lost ball.”

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  “Then there are plenty of Marine Parades, if that’s what you mean. Every seaside resort has them.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s got to be more retired than that,” I said.

  “Well, gentlemen, I can’t think of anywhere else. Of course, there’s the Ruff—”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The big chalk headland in Kent, close to Bradgate. It’s got a lot of villas on the top, and some of the houses have staircases down to a private beach. It’s a very high-toned sort of place, and the residents there like to keep by themselves.”

  I tore open the Tide Tables and found Bradgate. High tide there was at 10.27 p.m. on the 15th of June.

  “We’re on the scent at last,” I cried excitedly. “How can I find out what is the tide at the Ruff?”

  “I can tell you that, sir,” said the coastguard man. “I once was lent a house there in this very month, and I used to go out at fight to the deep-sea fishing. The tide’s ten minutes before Bradgate.”

  I closed the book and looked round at the company.

  “If one of those staircases has thirty-nine steps we have solved the mystery, gentlemen,” I said. “I want the loan of your car, Sir Walter, and a map of the roads. If Mr Macgillivray will spare me ten minutes, I think we can prepare something for to-morrow.”

  It was ridiculous in me to take charge of the business like this, but they didn’t seem to mind, and after all I had been in the show from the start. Besides, I was used to rough jobs, and these eminent gentlemen were too clever not see it. It was General Royer who gave me my commission. “I for one,” he said, “am content to leave the matter in Mr Hannay’s hands.”

  By half-past three I was tearing past the moonlit hedgerows of Kent, with Macgillivray’s best man on the seat beside me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Various Parties Converging on the Sea

  A pink and blue June morning found me at Bradgate looking from the Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the Cock sands which seemed the size of a bell-buoy. A couple of miles farther south and much nearer the shore a small destroyer was anchored. Scaffe, Macgillivray’s man, who had been in the Navy, knew the boat, and told me her name and her commander’s, so I sent off a wire to Sir Walter.

  After breakfast Scaffe got from a house agent a key for the gates of the staircases on the Ruff. I walked with him along the sands, and sat down in a nook of the cliffs while he investigated the half-dozen of them. I didn’t want to be seen, but the place at this hour was quite deserted, and all the time I was on that beach I saw nothing but the seagulls.

  It took him more than an hour to do the job, and when I saw him coming towards me, coming a bit of paper, I can tell you my heart was in my mouth. Everything depended, you see, on my guess proving fight.

  He read aloud the number of steps in the different stairs. “Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-nine, forty-two, forty-seven,” and “twenty-one” where the cliffs grew lower. I almost got up and shouted.

  We hurried back to the town and sent a wire to Macgillivray. I wanted half a dozen men, and I directed them to divide themselves among different specified hotels. Then Scaife set out to prospect the house at the head of the thirty-nine steps.

  He came back with news that both puzzled and reassured me. The house was called Trafalgar Ledge, and belonged to an old gentleman called Appleton—a retired stockbroker, the house agent said. Mr Appleton was there a good deal in the summer time, and was in residence now—had been for the better part of a week. Scaife could pick up very little information about him, except that he was a decent old fellow, who paid his bills regularly, and was always good for a fiver for a local charity. Then Scaife seems to have penetrated to the back door of the house, pretending he was an agent for sewing-machines. Only three servants were kept, a cook, a parlour-maid, and a housemaid, and they were just the sort that you would find in a respectable middle-class household. The cook was not the gossiping kind, and had pretty soon shut the door in his face, but Scaire said he was positive she knew nothing. Next door there was a new house building which would give good cover for observation, and the villa on the other side was to let, and its garden was rough and shrubby.

&nb
sp; I borrowed Scaife’s telescope, and before lunch went for a walk along the Ruff. I kept well behind the rows of villas, and found a good observation point on the edge of the golf course. There I had a view of the line of turf along the cliff top, with seats placed at intervals, and the little square plots, rafted in and planted with bushes, whence the staircases descended to the beach. I saw Trafalgar Lodge very plainly, a red-brick villa with a veranda, a tennis lawn behind, and in front the ordinary seaside flower garden full of marguerites and scraggy geraniums. There was a flag staff from which an enormous Union Jack hung limply in the still air.

  Presently I observed someone leave the house and saunter along the cliff. When I got my glasses on him I saw it was an old man, wearing white flannel trousers, a blue serge jacket, and a straw hat. He carried field-glasses and a newspaper, and sat down on one of the iron seats and began to read. Sometimes he would lay down the paper and turn his glasses on the sea. He looked for a long time at the destroyer. I watched him for half an hour, till he got up and went back to the house for his luncheon, when I returned to the hotel for mine.

  I wasn’t feeling very confident. This decent commonplace dwelling was not what I had expected. The man might be the bald archæologist of that horrible moorland farm, or he might not. He was exactly the kind of satisfied old bird you will find in every suburb and every holiday place. If you wanted a type of the perfectly harmless person you would probably pitch on that.

  But after lunch, as I sat in the hotel porch, I perked up, for I saw the thing I had hoped for and had dreaded to miss. A yacht came up from the south and dropped anchor pretty well opposite the Ruff. She seemed about a hundred and fifty tons, and I saw she belonged to the Squadron from the white ensign. So Scaffe and I went down to the harbour and hired a boatman for an afternoon’s fishing.

  I spent a warm and peaceful afternoon. We caught between us about twenty pounds of cod and lythe, and out in that dancing blue sea I took a cheerier view of things. Above the white cliffs of the Ruff I saw the green and red of the villas, and especially the great flag staff of Trafalgar Lodge. About four o’clock, when we had fished enough, I made the boatman row us round the yacht, which lay like a delicate white bird, ready at a moment to flee. Scaffe said she must be a fast boat from her build, and that she was pretty heavily engined.

  Her name was the Ariadne, as I discovered from the cap of one of the men who was polishing brasswork. I spoke to him, and got an answer in the soft dialect of Essex. Another hand that came along passed me the time of day in an unmistakable English tongue. Our boatman had an argument with one of them about the weather, and for a few minutes we lay on our oars close to the starboard bow.

  Then the men suddenly disregarded us and bent their heads to their work as an officer came along the deck. He was a pleasant, clean-looking young fellow, and he put a question to us about our fishing in very good English. But there could be no doubt about him. His close-cropped head and the cut of his collar and tie never came out of England.

  That did something to reassure me, but as we rowed back to Bradgate my obstinate doubts would not be dismissed. The thing that worried me was the reflection that my enemies knew that I had got my knowledge from Scudder, and it was Scudder who had given me the clue to this place. If they knew that Scudder had this clue, would they not be certain to change their plans? Too much depended on their success for them to take any risks. The whole question was how much they understood about Scudder’s knowledge. I had talked confidently last night about Germans always sticking to a scheme, but if they had any suspicions that I was on their track they would be fools not to cover it. I wondered if the man last night had seen that I recognized him. Somehow I did not think he had, and to that I clung. But the whole business had never seemed so difficult as that afternoon when by all calculations I should have been rejoicing in assured success.

  In the hotel I met the commander of the destroyer, to whom Scaife introduced me, and with whom I had a few words. Then I thought I would put in an hour or two watching Trafalgar Lodge.

  I found a place farther up the hill, in the garden of an empty house. From there I had a full view of the court, on which two figures were having a game of tennis. One was the old man whom I had already seen; the other was a younger fellow, wearing some club colours in the scarf round his middle. They played with tremendous zest, like two city gents who wanted hard exercise to open their pores. You couldn’t conceive a more innocent spectacle. They shouted and laughed and stopped for drinks, when a maid brought out two tankards on a salver. I rubbed my eyes and asked myself if I was not the most immortal fool on earth. Mystery and darkness had hung about the men who hunted me over the Scotch moor in aeroplane and motor-car, and notably about that infernal antiquarian. It was easy enough to connect these folk with the knife that pinned Scudder to the floor, and with fell designs on the world’s peace. But here were two guileless citizens taking their innocuous exercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum dinner, where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket scores and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been making a net to catch vultures and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump thrushes had blundered into it.

  Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag of golf clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they were chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then the plump man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must have a tub. I heard his very words—“I’ve got into a proper lather,” he said. “This will bring down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on to-morrow and give you a stroke a hole.” You couldn’t find anything much more English than that.

  They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot. I had been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might be acting; but if they were, where was their audience? They didn’t know I was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything but what they seemed—three ordinary, game-playing, suburban Englishmen, wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.

  And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was plump, and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder’s notes; and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at least one German officer. I thought of Karolides lying dead and all Europe trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had left behind me in London who were waiting anxiously for the events of the next hours. There was no doubt that hell was afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had won, and if it survived this June night would bank its winnings.

  There seemed only one thing to do—go forward as if I had no doubts, and if I was going to make a fool of myself to do it handsomely. Never in my life have I faced a job with greater disinclination. I would rather in my then mind have walked into a den of anarchists, each with his Browning handy, or faced a charging lion with a popgun, than enter that happy home of three cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their game was up. How they would laugh at me!

  But suddenly I remembered a thing I heard once in Rhodesia from old Peter Pienaar. I have quoted Peter already in this narrative. He was the best scout I ever knew, and before he had turned respectable he had been pretty often on the windy side of the law, when he had been wanted badly by the authorities. Peter once discussed with me the question of disguises, and he had a theory which struck me at the time. He said, barring absolute certainties like finger-prints, mere physical traits were very little use for identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed at things like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The only thing that mattered was what Peter called “atmosphere.”

  If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had been first observed, and—this is the important part—really play up to these surroundings and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives o
n earth. And he used to tell a story of how he once borrowed a black coat and went to church and shared the same hymn-book with the man that was looking for him. If that man had seen him in decent company before he would have recognized him; but he had only seen him snuffing the lights in a public-house with a revolver.

  The recollection of Peter’s talk gave me the first real comfort I had had that day. Peter had been a wise old bird, and these fellows I was after were about the pick of the aviary. What if they were playing Peter’s game? A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.

  Again, there was that other maxim of Peter’s which had helped me when I had been a roadman. “If you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are it.” That would explain the game of tennis. Those chaps didn’t need to act, they just turned a handle and passed into another life, which came as naturally to them as the first. It sounds a platitude, but Peter used to say that it was the big secret of all the famous criminals.